Pots, kettles and a Greenpeace report

Lack of transparency, EH?

That’s the charge (amongst a catalogue of others) Greenpeace and other NGOs level against the PEFC and SFI environmental certification schemes in a new report. But hang on a minute. Scratch the surface of On the ground; the controversies of PEFC and SFI, as PEFC has done in a comprehensive rebuttal, and you find it’s not exactly crystal clear itself. Blink and you’ll miss a tiny sentence lurking two thirds of the way down page seven acknowledging that all the organisations involved with it (like Greenpeace itself) are dyed-in-the-wool backers of the FSC certification scheme.

In their world, it’s the FSC way or the highway and the sooner all other schemes genuflect to that gospel and voluntarily wind themselves up, the better. So what this all seems to amount to, yet again, is weary old certification turf wars. The scheme we support is better than your scheme; oh no it isn’t, oh yes it is.

As was pointed out by Karen Brandt, European spokesperson for the North American SFI scheme, all that’s achieved by such intemperate broadsides as Greenpeace et al’s latest is to divert energy, resources and attention away from the real issue – getting sustainable forest management and timber production systems established worldwide.

It’s patently absurd, and frankly now quite tiresome, to paint ‘rival’ certification schemes as almost as bad as the deforesters and illegal loggers all the schemes are trying to eradicate. And it should be transparently obvious to everyone that the topic that ought to be the key focus is the fact that 90% of the world’s forests are still uncertified by any scheme. The less time spent banging off 57-page reports and more spent working together on this glaring shortcoming, the better off we’d all be.